Project Logos

About Project Logos

Program Definitions

Project Logos focuses its efforts in four interrelated ways:

Collaboration: This area includes projects designed to create a focal point or common goal for a group of writers, artists, scholars, and community members. The finished product - whether it's a book, an opera or a scholarly paper - will bear the imprint of the collaboration. An example of a model collaboration may be one in which a painter, a writer and a biologist all focus on aquatic life at the Arboretum. This interest may culminate in a common, single project or it may help to create a series of individual projects informed and enriched by the collaboration.

Environmental Studies: By its nature, environmental studies encourages writers to cross numerous disciplinary boundaries, bringing together geography, physiology, political science, medicine, theology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines relevant to this emerging field. More basically, this concentration challenges old ways of thinking which set humans apart from and above natural ecosystems and explores the interconnections between human choices and actions and a world that will sustain life. Environmental studies is collaborative, is a work of translation, and calls for a spirituality that is cosmic, embodied, and radically hopeful.

Translation: Translation is the metaphor to describe the transporting of the strengths, methodologies, and vocabularies of one discipline, medium, or genre into the strengths, methodologies, and vocabularies of another discipline, medium, or genre. This kind of translation not only encourages discourse between communities that don't always naturally communicate but also ideally generates a new, innovative discourse worthy of exploration through creative writing and dialogue. Programs that build on this metaphor might include new projects that propose innovative ways of combining, for example, the discourse of science with the discourse of poetry; projects that seek new methods for interchange between the academic community and the non academic community or the literal translation from one language into another.

Spirituality: Our emphasis in this area will focus on spirituality as forms of practice and experience that make testimony. Projects in this area encourage writers to ponder the transcendent or the holy as both experience and as impetus toward action in the world. A spiritual view challenges the modern division of the world into secular and sacred, public and private.